The Wall

When I was a kid, I had this vision of living in a house with a staircase that had tons of wall space. And I would lay in bed thinking about all the pictures I would put on that wall. Assuming I got married and had kids, the wall would start with pictures from the wedding and be filled with our lives with the kids as they got older. As you walk up the stairs, you’d be walking through a picture gallery of my life. (I can’t quite remember where I got the idea from. It was either from some show I saw on TV or from one of the homes I helped my grandmother clean when I was a kid, because not one person in my family had a house with a second story. That was for rich people and we were decidedly not rich.)

In 2009, we bought a house and I immediately fell in love with the stairwell. It was even better than the one from my dreams. The first thing I did right after moving in was buy a ton of black frames to put up pictures from our wedding. Lola came a few months after we moved in, so the next thing to go up on The Wall were pictures from our newborn photo shoot with her. We lived together in our home for eight years, and there are a ton of great memories on The Wall.

Right after we split, I had the stairwell repainted. Eight years of grubby/greasy handprints on the wall had come to an end. Afterwards, I had a choice to make – do I leave off the photos with their father in them or do I rehang all the pictures? As I thought about what to do, I remembered a conversation I’d had with a friend a few weeks before. Her parents split up when she was very young – too young to remember them ever being together. She told me that after all these years, she would love to know if they really loved each other and if so, what was their love like. I didn’t want my kids to have the same thoughts 30 years from now.

So, one by one, I put the photos back on The Wall – starting with our wedding day. I’m not going to lie, it was hard to walk by them every day the first few months after we separated. I hung my favorite piece of “art” at the base of the stairs to remind me that perfection does not equal happiness.  

Every once in a while, one of the pictures goes missing. Turns out, when the kids are sad about being a family of three, they go to The Wall and grab their favorite picture with their dad in it and crawl in bed and stare at it with tears in their eyes. (I caught one of them doing that a few months after we split. I gotta say, that shit was hard!) So, I asked the kids if they wanted me to take the pictures with dad in them down and they both said no.

My kids will always know that our intention was to build a life together, the four of us. And I’m thankful that we still have space on The Wall for new memories. And that’s totally worth it.

Toya